


Living

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-22
Updated: 2008-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:34:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm living but not being, and there is a difference.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vivier](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=vivier).



Simon thinks I'm normal now. I walk and talk and function, I smile and sleep and play at grownup girl games, and he can smile and say he made a breakthrough.

We don't talk about Miranda. No one talks about Miranda, even if they see Reaver blood sliding off my skin in their dreams.

I feel it, a tugging along the edges of me, fraying in places, the slip-slide of consciousnesses in sleep, the pain that's so sharp it stings. This isn't the way it was supposed to be, pressing against my mind as I struggle for control. I want these normal things, the things I'm supposed to want. But I want more than this and know I can't have it, either. The assassin is still a girl, the Reader is still wrapped up in girlskin and wanting to feel what that means. But she's the Albatross as well, and I don't think they realize what this means. They don't remember the old stories, but I've had nothing but time to absorb them. And become them.

I'm lucid now, whatever that means. But really I think it's because I've learned not to speak, not to elaborate on what I yearn for, to see between the different selves everyone projects. I know what is an object and what isn't, and I know which version of the objects they see. But this ability sets me apart even more, even if they don't know what I'm doing.

They're set in their ways, all of them, set with seeing me as the child I haven't been. But even the throwback won't make me a woman, even he can't see. Won't see.

It seems I'm truly living in dreams, in derangements of neuron firings that no one else will ever see, that I can never share. I swear I'm happy, I'm good and I'm true. I swear I'm better, but it feels so lonely to be so. They don't see me, not all of me, like the splintered selves aren't there anymore and I'm left aside to be an automaton for someone else's vision. It's lonely in the corner, looking out at the everywhere that everyone else takes as the only solution.

I'm living but not being, and there is a difference.

I look in the mirror and see someone else in the reflection, a face and eyes that aren't my own, a life that stopped being mine a long time ago. A small price to pay for freedom, perhaps, free of blue and hands and tests and misfirings in the system. It seems that they prefer the creature of their own visions, the one living in the ghosts of their dreams. I can't remind them enough that I'm not her, can't be her, but they go on living the way they do and thinking the way they do. I'm caught in the shadows of their beliefs, lost amongst the wishes they press into my skin like talismans to a lost god.

Kaylee sees me for who I am, though I think she's afraid of it. The fear cuts at me, rends me to ribbons. She doesn't know why I stay away from the engine room. I can hear Serenity, too, but not in the language of machines but of speech. The recyclers talk to me in Serenity's voice, speak through me in tongues best left unspoken.

Inara pulled me aside one time. I think I left her dizzy. No one else comes close to understanding this living in spaces feeling.

I curl up in my room, this feeling that isn't feeling, and let the stars drift past. They don't question, and the equations all stay still. One day I may dance out of time, sing out of tune, and be restrung yet again with a new blend of smoothers and pills and precautions. Or maybe I'll simply walk on air, drift out of this life and into another, fade into shadows on a forgotten planet and leave the others to their sorrows. Maybe it'll be better that way, to not be reminded so continually of the pain they had to bear in order to bear me up. I know sometimes they think it's too dear a price to pay, and I feel that under their words. I _know_ even if they don't consciously. I react to it even if they can't help it.

I shake myself loose and head to the bridge, to the birdcage. I'm the albatross, the cross they bear, the visible marker of a government's sins they paid to let loose. I haven't tried hard enough to let go of Miranda's voices, perhaps. But someone needs to hear the ghosts and speak with them. No one else is capable. No one else would want to, but I'm living alone but for them. They're the only comfort I have right now.

_Sleep is gentle,_ they tell me. _Sleep is forever, quiet and deep. The stillness will make you cry, but there's no longer any pain. The cold is here, the dark is here, the silence is here. It never ends, never, and there's no point to rage against it. There is a final destination, a ceasing and an ending. There is something for everyone here, and that something is finality._

They're my reminder. This is why I keep on living. I don't believe in finality. I believe in quantum mechanics and solar singularities. I believe Shrodinger's cat is both dead and alive until I collapse the wave. I believe in mechanical theory, astrophysics, geometry and dance. You can't chart the skies without it, you can't believe in the impossible without it. You can't move, fluid and broken into shards, without the knowledge that finite things don't always exist. A little girl broken to pieces shouldn't move this way, shouldn't think this way, and yet she's capable of such things she'd never dreamt of.

No one talks about Miranda, the dead voices that still whisper there. If they asked me, I would have told them about the voices that linger. I would have said what my response is, what the response _must_ be.

But no one asks, no one tells. No one talks about Miranda, going through the motions as if it never happened, even as we live with the fallout in the wasteland of pain.

I'm living but not being, even if no one sees the difference but me.

 

The End


End file.
